FAILED LOW QUALITY ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT SHAMES AMERICA

Would-be hero Allen: the buckshot stops here

In the latest humiliation for America, an attempt to assassinate its worthless, corrupt, senile, and paedo-adjacent President proved to be of even lower quality than the target itself.

Sadly for all Americans, this latest attempt to kill Trump was not a high-quality Lee Harvey Oswald "miracle shot" that smeared the President's brains all over Dealey Plaza (and the First Lady) or a John Wilkes Booth's masterpiece of walking-the-fuck-up-to-the-President-and-blowing-that-motherfucker's-shit-clean-away.

Fuck, yeah!

Instead, it was a half-baked, low-quality piece of pointless performative crap and hysterical emo-venting, like so much else in modern-day America. 

The would-be assassin, Cole Tomas Allen, got the first part right by arranging to have three names instead of two names like normal people, but after that it was sadly downhill. 

The 31-year-old mixed-race gunman's "dastardly plan" to assassinate the President involved "rushing" a secret service/security checkpoint outside the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, where President Trump and other administration officials were present, armed with a shotgun primed with buckshot.

This would have perhaps worked if Donald Trump had been Donald Duck, a theory once pushed by failed GOP Presidential candidate Chris Christie, and had been sitting on a sleepy lake early in the morning, but was completely useless against even even low-grade modern-day American security.  

Trump as the assassin hoped to find him

Reports say that Allen exchanged "buckshot" with law enforcement and secret service personal at the checkpoint, with one officer sustaining minor injuries, after which the assailant was tackled and subdued at the scene.

In fact, Allen did not even reach the ballroom, where Trump and other attendees, like Stephen Miller, were panicking at the loud, ineffectual noises.

Luckily for the President, he had already "donned" his industrial strength diaper for the evening, and was thus able to successfully prevent an embarrassing leakage of enormous amounts of "fear-sewage" onto the floor of the Washington Hilton hotel.

Donald Trump having another diaper-full moment

NOTE: Certain liberties were taken with the English language in writing this news story in order to make it more intelligible to average Americans.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: GEOPOLITICAL JOKE

Nothing has taken more of a beating from the 4 years of the Russo-Ukrainian war than John Mearsheimer's reputation as an so-called "intellectual." Whether you view him as merely a deep asset for the Kremlin, forced to surface to defend "Mother Russia" in increasingly ludicrous ways, or as a sincere geopolitical theorist whose ideas of "offensive realism" and "great power rationalism" have been crushed by facts on the ground, one thing is clear: Mearsheimer is a geopolitical joke. Joni Askola surveys the carnage.

GULF WAR III IS A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR ANTI-AMERICAN FORCES TO CRUSH THE WEST

No Midterms to worry about.

by Colin Liddell

In the war in the Gulf, it is pretty clear by now that the Trump kakistocracy has no plan beyond pumping out the next bit of slop aligned with its increasingly delusional self-image of Trump as "genius"/"Jesus"/"greatest general"/ whatever (who gives a fuck)! 

But just because America has no plan, it would be naïve to assume no one else involved in this does, or that America's lack of a plan is the dominant factor.

Israel clearly has a plan, not much of one, it must be said, as it mainly consists of keeping things on the boil in order to keep Netanyahu out of jail. Much more important are the plans of the chief anti-Western forces, as these are almost certain to be deep, long-term, and profound.

Russia, after its prolonged drubbing at the hands of the Ukrainians, has now fallen into the "back seat" of the Anti-Western forces, and, while benefitting from the Straits of Hormuz being closed and Trump being a Putin fanboy/ Russian asset, is increasingly operating on a day-by-day basis as the cracks in the regime start to widen.

But what about China? This is now the dominant animus of anti-American/Western globalism, all the more so as they want to replace it with Sino-globalism. 

Just to be clear here, whether this is a good or bad thing is not my concern here. I am mainly dealing with the geopolitical pattern that is now unfolding, while attempting to infer intelligently into the gaps. Suffice to say, China has its own problems and interests, but as far as its leaders are concerned, they have been drawn into a rivalry with the West that will dominate their thinking, rather than the imploding demographics that look set to destroy China over the next century or so.

From the perspective of the Chinese leadership, Trump is a golden opportunity to crush the West. While some, like Vlad Vexler, see Trump as an example of a new type of leader that is emerging across the world, the probability is that he is more a temporary aberration and one that may in fact ultimately reinforce the system. Orban's recent demise underlines this point.

Once the "orange shit stain" (as I now refer to him) is expunged by the American democratic process, it is, I think, a reasonable bet that more normal types of people (think Mitt Romney, Al Gore, or even Dick Cheney) will be back in charge in Washington, working once again within the still very potent Western alliance system. Safeguards against repetitions of Trump and his blatant corruption will then most probably be strengthened. Trump, at the end of the day, will not turn out to be the "Western Antichrist," but instead, to quote The Life of Brian, just "a very naughty boy."

More slopulist than populist

This is probably how the Chinese also view him, namely as a temporary glitch in the Western democratic system that opposes them.

But having such a leader at the centre of the West—someone who has zero understanding of, and even less sympathy with, the Western democratic system and is clearly mentally challenged and ingesting his own slop at a toxic rate—is itself an enormous opportunity and one that a deep, long-term, high IQ, and strategic geopolitical rival should not be expected to pass up.

In this context, the Gulf War is a godsend. Not only is America acting alone, but it has behaved essentially in a unjustifiable and "terroristic" manner, unilaterally breaking peace treaties,  launching undeclared war, and assassinating the top levels of the leadership of the country that it then asks to sit down with and discuss peace. WTF?!

In the same way that December 7th 1941 handed Roosevelt the moral authority to conduct WWII and launch the Manhattan Project, February 28th 2026 has granted Iran's leadership moral plausibility for using the Straits of Hormuz as a weapon of "self defence," while also helping to justify its quest for an A-bomb.

The only reason that the Straits of Hormuz were ever open in the first place was because of the Anglo-American international system that created "freedom of the seas," the very same "international system" that Trump has spent his first year-and-a-half in office shitting all over. 

To allow America to walk away from this mess of its own making would thus be a massive missed opportunity or even a defeat for Xi Jingpin.

Anti-American interests will best be served by either (a) an obvious American defeat that hands Iran some control over the Straits and allows nuclear enrichment to continue, or (b) widening and deepening the conflict. 

As we move into May, the Chinese know that we are only half a year from Trump's main pain point, the 2026 Midterm elections. They know this will induce Trump to either take an early loss against Iran, which he will then try to sell to his moron base as a "win," or else provoke him into deepening the war, most notably by committing effective "war crimes" (blowing up non-military power supply, etc) and putting boots on the ground. 

As America has no plan to win, no allies to back it up, and no internal consistency (even in the Trump camp) to follow such a course, provoking Trump into such a course of action is the optimum for China.

Not only would America end up redeploying more military assets covering China and deplete already dangerously depleted weapons stocks, it would also lead to an outright military defeat, as US casualties mounted and the pressure to retreat became irresistible. 

The only factor that the Anti-Western forces fear would be an uprising by the Iranian people. Most experts, however, judge that that moment was lost weeks before the US attacked Iran, when the last uprising was crushed by Iranian security forces at their leisure, because America's military assets were on the other side of the world in dicking around in Venezuela. Yes, Trump's enormous stupidity and lack of a coherent plan must never be underestimated!

Also, the bombing campaign that America has been engaged in has placed the Iranian regime and its people in the same boat, while hardening the resolve of the regime.

Because of all these factors, expect the Chino-Iranians to keep this conflict alive and to bait Trump into escalating it. They would be foolish to do otherwise. Meanwhile America's moronic President is being pushed in a great puddle of his own slop and bullshit into the corner of the Midterms.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

BULLSHIT IS THE FIRST CASUALITY OF WAR

Losers in Hormuz

by Nix Jeelvy

There’s rarely something new under the sun and therefore, there’s rarely something new in the sciences that describe things under the sun. Therefore, I’m sure that the phenomenon I’m about to describe and name has been described and named by older thinkers and given a better name. Nevertheless, with the readership’s permission, I’d like to say that we live in the era of rule by bullshit, or bullshitocracy, which is to say an era where the predominant method of rule is the wholesale disruption of reality by undermining the population’s ability to tell truth from falsehood and then seizing the initiative in the thus formed chaotic information space by being the loudest voice while the pig-headed ignoramuses who still believe in Aristotelian truth are busy debunking your bullshit.

The undisputed champion of rule by bullshit is none other than Vladimir Putin, who rules Russia not so much with an iron fist as with a flexible definition of what truth is. As described in Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True, Everything is Possible, the method of rule in Russia is to inundate the population with multiple contradictory narratives, each containing truth and falsehood in various amounts with the primary aim not so much of deceiving them, but primarily of confusing them. The volume is as important as the falsehood, and the goal isn’t to turn the population into true believers, but rather to turn them into cynical non-believers who find belief itself a laughable proposition. In such an environment, since nobody believes anything, nobody has any means of coordinating resistance to the regime which wins by default.

Of course, whilst Putin is the champion, there are numerous contenders for second place. By tenure and intensity of bullshit, the silver medal ought to belong to Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, as widely known as he is wide (and he is wide indeed, being one of those very few national leaders with the girth of a nation). Faced with a serious challenger for the first time in his 16 year rule, and the ire of the Hungarian people after 16 years of graft, corruption, self-enrichment, protection of paedophiles and even a scandal involving zebras, he has elected to run an election campaign not against his opponent but against - Volodymyr Zelensky, who’s the President of another country, ineligible for any office of the Hungarian state. Hungarian infospace has therefore been flooded with AI slop picturing Zelensky frog-marching the opposition or Ukrainian soldiers in Nazi uniforms executing Hungarians, because that’s totally what’s at stake, rather than Orbán and his cronies spending some time on a much needed prison diet.

Now, while Orbán wins on duration (now thankfully truncated) and intensity, the big points for impact have to go to Mr. Donald J. Trump, bullshitter-in-chief of the once great nation of America. He represents an interesting case in it that he is a relic of the previous era, when bullshit mostly came from individual bullshitters who bullshat on the strength of their own charisma, instead of relying on a state security apparatus to flood the zone with bullshit on their behalf. Old school bullshitters aimed to circumvent the natural skepticism of people, whereas bullshittocrats aim to weaponise these skeptical instincts in order to destroy people’s ability to believe anything at all. In this sense, it’d appear that Trump would be the weakest of the bullshitocrats, were it not for the fact that he has ignited the age-old American yearning for fanatical devotion for a cult leader. In a sense, MAGA is a very old phenomenon, being a millenarian protestant doomsday cult. In another sense, it is a new phenomenon, being a secular and political doomsday cult.

The uniquely American characteristics notwithstanding, MAGA has moved to corner the information market, just like United Russia and Fidesz before them. The first move was to seize Twitter and turn it into a right-wing disinformation plantation, where Russian and Israeli agents, both of the paid shill and useful idiot variety run rampant, working their magic and flooding the zone with bullshit. The subsequent steps, which followed the takeover of the US federal government by MAGA, have been taken by the Ellison family of Oracle notoriety. They’ve bought TikTok as well as the major American news networks on behalf of Trump. Incidentally, it was Oracle and the Ellisons which built China’s Great Firewall, which represents the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to keep the media consumption of their thralls free of anything that may go against the tenets of extractive oligarchy with clownishly corrupt characteristics.

Larry and David Ellison: their investment strategy suggests that they despise you

As a result of MAGA’s blitz of the media and subsequent implementation of the tried and tested firehose of bullshit strategy, Americans seem to have completely lost the ability to tell truth from falsehood, and have relocated from reality to hyperreality, precisely as predicted by Jean Baudrillard. Indeed, so powerful is the hyperreal that the commodity markets have stopped reacting primarily to commodities and started reacting to the bullshitter-in-chief’s bullshit pronouncements.

The behaviour of the commodity markets in particular is interesting because the American bullshitocracy has somehow managed to recreate Soviet style shortages by means of capitalism. In terms of economics, the process is simple. When the price signal is disrupted, consumers of a particular good or service no longer receive good information as to its availability (supply) and will therefore not adjust their consumption thereof (demand). Whether the disrupting mechanism is a government fixing prices or commodity traders joining a secular millenarian death cult is irrelevant. If oil ought to, in light of the actual supply, be $120 a barrel and is trading at $93 a barrel, then the demand won’t shift to accommodate the real availability, nor will supplier increase (or decrease) operations in order to profit from this rising price. Thus this bullshit-based price signal distortion, which is driven in no small part by market manipulation on part of the turbo-corrupt Trump regime, will eventually lead to oil shortages even greater than what we’d have seen from just the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

And here, in the doldrums of economic theory, do we find that nemesis of bullshit, reality. While bullshitocracy can truck on for a long time, it will always eventually run aground on the shoals of reality. Usually, reality will arrive in the form of a war, because war is a conflict between two organised polities and a bullshitocracy which goes to war is pitted directly against an enemy, i.e. an organised political group which by definition does not share the delusions necessary for the orderly functioning of a bullshittocracy. Less glamorous are economic factors, or as the Russian saying goes, “there’s a war on between the TV and the refrigerator.” No matter how many times Trump declares that the Iran War is over, the Strait of Hormuz is a real, physical place, closed down with real, physical drones and missiles and real, physical oil cannot exit it and make it to world markets. This creates real, physical shortages which may or may not be reflected in the price of oil which is after all, a social convention and therefore vulnerable to bullshit.

It is telling that the absolute champion of bullshitocracy himself, Vladimir Putin, ran aground on the shoals of Ukrainian reality, with his two-day special military operation degenerating into a drawn out, four-year war of attrition, in which curiously enough, it was the larger state that has been mostly attritted away. The reason for this blunder by the supposed master strategist is rather simple. He believed his own bullshit about Ukrainians being a "brother nation" which was kidnapped from the "Russian World" by evil CIA westerners unleashing the dark magic of a colour revolution.

Putin after 4 years of truth bombs

Orbán seems to have fallen prey to the same unfortunate tendency, but more in the sense that while he and his Fidesz gargoyles have kept believing the bullshit, in the average Hungarian home, the refrigerator seems to have won the war against the television.

And now we come to Donald Trump, whose bullshit has failed to persuade the Iranian government. Feeling empowered by the "Fracas in Caracas," he came to believe that he could effect regime change with "surgical interventions," not realising that America was allowed to kidnap Maduro by willing Venezuelan co-conspirators (tellingly, only Maduro’s Cuban bodyguards fought the American forces). Regardless of how much he lies, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and oil remains in short supply. No matter how hard he tries to manipulate the markets in order to stave off a recession or indeed, a depression, at some point physical reality must rudely insert itself into the conversation. And no matter how much he would like to chicken out, declare victory and go bother someone else, the Iranians have no interest in ending a conflict they believe they’re winning, and for that matter, neither do the Israelis.

The past several years have not been kind to us Aristotelians. We have seen our precious postulates of A=A being shredded away before our eyes by people whose idea of reality is the shared delusion of society. We have stubbornly clung to physical reality whilst the rest of the planet has elected to believe in faeries and ghosts. But now, our time has come. War, that disagreeable yet munificent uncle of reality-based politics has decided to disrupt the friendly family get-together and very rudely bring reality in from the cold. Because war, because it is the utmost political act and the political act with the utmost consequences leaves no room for bullshit. War turns lies into a luxury because guns, bombs and bayonets are real in a way that no social medium or television programme is. Some damned fool or other once said that truth is the first casualty of war. Perhaps, in a bygone age when men lied but still knew what the truth was. In our time, however, it is bullshit, not truth which is the first casualty of war. 

AMERICA LOSES LATEST WAR BECAUSE ENEMY COUNTRY "WAS WRONG SHAPE"

America appears to have lost its latest war because the country it went to war with was the wrong shape.

In previous wars that America has lost, the reasons were because the enemy country had zero population or too many beavers (Canada), too difficult to find on a map leading to resupply issues (Afghanistan), or had difficult-to-pronounce place names, causing American soldier's to suffer PTSD (almost everywhere).

However, this is believed to be the first time that America has lost because the enemy country was the wrong shape. In particular, one part of the country, known as the "Straight of Hormuz," wasn't even straight, but was instead bent at an "ugly" angle making "war math" difficult, while also limiting the supply of "gas" on the global market, forcing innocent Americans to use public transport.

As for the rest of the enemy country, it was an unsightly non-isosceles or scalene trapezoid with triangular propensities, something that deeply unnerved US military planners.

Another problem cited by the Pentagon was that the country was "up-and-down" and "full of rocks," but this is textural issue, so it can only be considered a contributing factor rather than a main cause leading to America's shameful humiliation.

Due to this setback in US military ambitions, calls have been made in Congress to set up a Department of Military Geometry to ensure that America's brave heroes only go to war with countries of the right shape in future.

WHY ALEX PRETTI'S DEATH WAS ABOUT THE MILLENNIAL AGE PILL RATHER THAN IMMIGRATION

Doctoring the medic

by Robert Stark

Alex Pretti, who was killed by ICE at an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, probably followed the normie life script of getting good grades, going to University, and getting a good job in hope that it would land him a wife, family, and social status. Certainly, Pretti had success in his career as a VA ICU nurse, so by most metrics he was an upstanding member of society. However, he was odd looking, and very well could have been an incel, approaching middle age without a wife and kids, though he was divorced. So basically he was a failed normie.

The media even had to use AI to manipulate his image to make him appear better looking, thus more sympathetic to liberal women, which is kind of sad. However, he likely wasn’t a misogynist, like the incels or red pillers, thus was desperate for female moral approval. Perhaps being woke was an attempt to be relevant to the zoomettes at the anti-ICE rallies. I am not at all implying that he wanted to assassinate anyone like Luigi Mangione did, but perhaps he envied the female attention that Mangione garnered as a Chad. Regardless, this is all speculation, as I don’t know what was going on in his mind or his entire personal life story.

The Psychosocial undertones of the ICE protest tragedies

There is this moment in your life when you realize that your chance at achieving your dream of what the good life is has past by and you snap, as it becomes harder to cope. To be brutally honest, I am dealing with this crisis myself, as I recently turned 40. Renee Good, who was also killed by ICE at the protest, was a similar age. However, it is harder to say if she was reacting to these psychosocial issues, as she had kids from a divorce and was in a lesbian relationship. I am going to take the high road which is not to virtue signal to appear moderate and non hateful, considering that I dislike Pretti and Good’s political views on immigration. Rather, I have some degree of empathy for them because I feel their pain as a fellow anguished elder millennial. Not to mention that Good’s children are orphans which is tragic. Millennials are the first generation to be devastated by the total breakdown in social cohesion, and zoomers will probably end up worse off. However, zoomers have a slight advantage of knowing that society is rigged against them early on. What will happen to all these millennials, as they grow old alone, with no social support network and have nothing to lose?

There is a psychological profile of a person who feels a need to be a hero, which is also uniquely engrained in American culture, in which life must be a movie script. People having unfulfilled psychosocial issues, failing to achieve certain life milestones, and a sense of emptiness, further pushes people in this direction. While the incel school shooter is far more nihilistic, in contrast with these people who desire moral capital and heroism, there are some parallels in how they react to existential despair and vulnerable narcissism, which I also relate to.

Politics fills that void of existential despair and creates a hero arch for oneself when one’s life is meaningless and one’s future trajectory looks hopeless. Politics has taken the place of religion and so many people want to be martyrs for their political cause. People tell themselves that their motives are purely moral and righteous, but these subconscious psychosocial undertones always come into play. This also applied to failed middle aged MAGA men with little left to lose who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, as well as Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire for Gaza.

The Trump admin’s official stance is that the deaths were purely accident and then you have some conservatives outright celebrating Pretti and Good’s deaths, which says a lot about where we are as a society. There is a lack of empathy to the other side which is both a sign of radical polarization and a total breakdown in social capital, and hyperreality where we live online and are disconnected from one another. I am not even trying to moralize but rather am just stating our reality.

Risking sounding like an annoying enlightened centrist type, both the Left and Right oversimplify the incidents to fit their particular narratives. The Left views ICE agents as mercilessly executing heroic protestors while the MAGA right views the ICE agents as all heroes and leftist protestors as domestic terrorists. Conservatives are right that leftist agitators are baiting ICE and trying to cause disorientation and chaos but ICE are falling for it and not handling the situation well. Either the ICE agents are not adequately trained or they are just used to dealing with border issues and not used to civilian law enforcement duties.

Alex Pretti encountered ICE before the day of his death in which he was belligerent and broke a rib in the altercation. Also, he had a concealed gun, which he had a legal permit for, thus there was some degree of ambiguity over culpability for his death. In contrast with Renee Good, it appeared that while she was driving away, the agents just shot her, even if she may have previously rammed her car into them. The agents who killed Pretti being Latino adds another angle of irony. Despite Trump being accused of being anti-Latino, ICE agents wearing face coverings like Latin American secret police and using excessive force against White American civilians is a signal of America’s Latinization. Another irony is you have leftwing protestors calling a Black ICE agent a house n-word, which epitomizes the dark woke meme. Basically, both sides are throwing out any niceties, which entails the Left giving up political correctness when dealing with their adversaries.

Trump says he isn’t focused on deporting “everybody”, only criminals.

While I am broadly sympathetic to nationalism and immigration restriction, Trump is fucking things up for that cause and MAGA cultists go along with it. The damage caused by the optics of the performative ICE raids has been done, even if Trump backs down on deportations, which looks likely as Trump is talking about only deporting criminals, as well as increasing H-2B visas for ag workers. Thus, carrying out mass deportations is the only path that Trump has left to maintain any legitimacy, especially considering that Democrats will win the midterms and obstruct him. It also seems like Trump is targeting Minneapolis for being a hub of leftwing activism while it actually has far fewer illegal immigrants per capita than cities like LA and Houston. ICE should minimize engaging with protesters and knock off the performative cruelty, and be doing more workforce raids. However, enforcing E-verify and sanctioning employers of illegal immigrants is the most effective way and a lot less messy.

Robert Stark's Substack

TRUMP'S TEDIOUS TERROR TACO SHOW CONTINUES ITS SAD RUN

He who lives by the slop must die by the slop

by Colin Liddell

It's all so tedious... On again, off again. Will he, won't he? To TACO or not to TACO? Oh, well, the latest news is yet another big TACO.

After talking big again about "wiping Persian civilization off the map," the orange shit stain that is now the American President suddenly did that thing he increasingly does—inventing a fake negotiation narrative to not do what all the experts are telling him would be sheer madness. The Iranians then chimed in to agree to a two-week ceasefire, knowing that the opposition to Trump can only grow in that period.

But this is no guarantee against further madness from the senile Boomer-in-Chief further down the line. Or maybe he just needs the pause in order to cook up another looney war to distract Fox viewers, one that he can actually win, like against Cuba or Denmark.

Honestly, who fuckin' cares!?

The worst part of this is that it takes up all the attention and oxygen from more important matters, while also providing cover for evil actors like Israel to launch yet another genocidal war, this time against Southern Lebanon.

It is no surprise that Israel is taking full advantage of the media's "Centaurian focus" on a single, big, dominating issue to wipe Lebanese villages off the map and annex territory all the way up to the Litani River. 

The worst part of all this is that the Ukrainian War has now been reduced to a minor news item, when it should be the leading item. But there is so much else that is being starved by Trump's constant media oxygen theft, like his failure to deport significant numbers of illegals, the main issue he got elected on. In fact, Trump is lagging behind other Presidents:

"Overall, deportations under Trump are lower than deportations under former President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, who immigrant rights advocates dubbed the "deporter-in-chief." But the Trump administration’s limited data release makes it difficult to compare.

During the last full fiscal year when Biden was in office, from October 2023 to September 2024, DHS deported about 778,000 people. Biden’s figure includes people deported at the border and people deported inside the U.S. Because of the high number of people who crossed the southern border under Biden, it’s likely that a large share of the deportations happened there.

Obama deported around 962,000 people in fiscal year 2009, from October 2008 to September 2009. As with Biden’s data, that included deportations at the border and inside the U.S."

And remember, neither Biden nor Obama campaigned 24-7 on deporting people. Trump did.

Here, the cruelty of ICE works as "magnifier of the miniscule," making the unimpressive number of deportations more "emotionally satisfying" to the easily deceived MAGA voter base that voted for them (and definitely not unnecessary wars with Iran).

The performative slop elements of this administration represent the cancerous nature of modern Western politics. 

Hopefully, where we are headed is towards a backlash against those negative aspects of Trumpism, and towards a rejection of the performative and manipulative aspects of politics. But for that to happen the entire slop-o-verse of the internet will have to be radially cleaned up.

Instead, we are more likely to have a woke backlash for a couple of years followed by more fake right-wing stupidity, amplified by the giant AI-enabled slop-o-verse.

The only plus side is that the next generation of politicians will have a dead-eyed look to them, while the cultural core of America that Trump found surprisingly potent ways to resonate with will be much more blackened, weakened, and hollowed out. Even if they are more cunning than Trump, they will lack his power to cause chaos. 
 

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated"

___________________________________

Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

ARTEMIS II CREW TAKE SPECTACULAR IMAGE OF EARTH

NASA has shared the first high-resolution images of the Earth taken by the Artemis II crew as they head on their trip around the Moon. 

The mission is believed to be the latest attempt by the Trump administration to get as far away from the Epstein Files as possible, with Artemis II expected to reach a maximum distance of approximately 252,799 miles from Earth during its lunar fly-around. This distance will set a new record for the farthest humans have ever travelled from the Epstein Files which at present remain largely on Earth.

The image, called "Hello World," shows the vast expanse of blue that is the Atlantic Ocean, framed by a thin glow of the atmosphere as the Earth eclipses the Sun and green auroras at either pole. Also visible is a large indistinct grey formation that almost looks like an elderly Jewish billionaire with silvery hair, although it is probably just clouds...or smoke from the war in Iran. 

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LONG WAR/ SHORT WAR SCENARIOS

Economist Dr. Joeri Schasfoort crunches the numbers on various Gulf War III scenarios. Conclusion: even in a long war the Gulf States are hit hard but with deep pockets can take plenty of punishment. Can Iran?